occasions.

These poor little animals took nearly four hours to go fourteen miles, and
even this rate of progression was only kept up by the help of continual
admonitions from a stout leather thong.

It was a dismal evening, very like one in England at the end of November--
the air cold and damp--and I found the chill from wet clothes and an east
wind anything but agreeable. The country also was extremely uninviting,
and I thought its aspect more gloomy than that of Nova Scotia. Sometimes
we traversed swamps swarming with bullfrogs, on corduroy roads which
nearly jolted us out of the vehicle, then dreary levels abounding in
spindly hacmetac, hemlock, and birch-trees; next we would go down into a
cedar-swamp alive with mosquitoes. Dense forests, impassable morasses, and
sedgy streams always bounded the immediate prospect, and the clearings
were few and far between. Nor was the conversation of my companions
calculated to beguile a tedious journey; it was on "_snatching_,"
"_snarlings_" and other puerilities of island politics, corn, sugar, and
molasses.

About dusk we reached the Bend, a dismal piece of alluvial swampy-looking
land, drained by a wide, muddy river, called the Petticodiac, along the
shore of which a considerable shipbuilding village is located. The tide
here rises and falls twenty-four feet, and sixty at the mouth of the
river, in the Bay of Fundy. It was a dispiriting view--acres of mud bare
at low water, and miles of swamp covered with rank coarse grass,
intersected by tide-streams, which are continually crossed on rotten
wooden bridges without parapets. This place had recently been haunted by
fever and cholera.